The Secret Sister

by Fotini Tsalikoglou

  “Ma’am, that dark gentleman, that man who grabbed Jonathan, did you notice, ma’am, that he looked just like Jonathan, that he was his spitting image?”

  And nobody spoke, except for you, Amalia, your eyes spoke and said:

  “Are you crazy? That’s nonsense. That madman looked nothing like my brother!”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I had said then, Jonathan. It was a lie.”

  And then the visit was over. You stayed on at school for your music class and I went home alone. They were waiting for me and the table was set. It was dinnertime. I sat down in my seat, and when they asked me “What happened in school today?” I replied, “I met my father. I saw him today for the first time.”

  Menelaos was thunderstruck, Grandma went to the kitchen to get some water, and Mama kept on eating her meal: roasted lamb with potatoes. Then Anthoula brought peeled oranges that smelled of cinnamon and spearmint.

  “Open your mouth, sweet child. Eat. Oranges are full of power and health.”

  I was keeping my mouth obstinately shut. When my sister isn’t here, what do I need power and health for? I want her to be here, to play the piano. To sing “The Northern Star” again. Have you ever heard such a beautiful voice? It’s like the song of the mermaids.

  “You’re exaggerating, Jonathan. If that were the case, then I’d . . . ”

  Be quiet.

  * * *

  The airplane is now flying at thirty thousand feet.

  “What would you like to drink?” the flight attendant asks me solicitously.

  When you grow up without a father, you make others want to take care of you. They might even think more highly of you. They sense you’re emitting an invisible fortitude, as if you’ve taken on the strength of the absent one.

  “It’s the blood talking,” said Anthoula one day while you were singing. What did she mean?

  Amalia, what does “It’s the blood talking” mean?

  “Why are you asking me? You should have asked others, back then.”

  There’s no time. People die, and you have to make sure you learn, while they’re alive, all the unintelligible words they’ve uttered, the allusive remarks, the censored thoughts. There’s no time. You have to make sure you clear up the shadows before they swallow you up and then you turn into a shadowman, like so many others. Anthoula’s gone, Grandpa, Grandma, they’re all gone. I never found out what she meant by: “It’s the blood talking.”

  “That’s why people travel, Jonathan.”

  What do you mean, Amalia?

  “That sometimes we come home to learn about all these things, before—”

  Go on, why did you stop?

  “Jonathan, the journey is yours.”

  You’re with me.

  “You’re traveling to Greece alone.”

  You’re with me.

  “Alone. Don’t kid yourself. How could I be with you? Are you forgetting, or are you pretending to forget?”

  Be quiet.

  A humming noise . . . The sky, an ocean that gives out no light, and a quilt of dark clouds inviting us to unfamiliar and therefore dangerous dreams. Sixty-four minutes have passed and still no turbulence. “Captain Watson and his crew would like to welcome you onboard . . . ” A man across the aisle wedges a pillow under his head and prepares to sleep. “The duration of our flight is eight hours and thirty-five minutes. Expected time of arrival in Athens is 9 o’clock local time . . . ” My fellow traveler hasn’t touched his tray of juice, nuts and snacks. Satiated business class passengers, Menelaos Argyriou was never one of you. His family lived with hunger, but never feared it. They grew attached to their homeland, perhaps because from the very start they missed it, it was never a given, it never gave them a sense of safety and security. They traveled far away with their minds focused on the wound. They never felt closer to their homeland than when they were far away.

  We were born and raised “far away.”

  “I know, Jonathan. New York, our city, never hurt us. Never frightened us. How lucky we were, Jonathan, to have grown up here and not over there.”

  “Over there” was a dot on the map. Green and dark grey and blue. In the Eastern Mediterranean, at the southernmost tip of the Balkan Peninsula, with seas and thousands of islands, with a dry and rocky soil, with foreign-sounding mountains, lakes and rivers—Olympus, Smolikas, Voras, Tymphi, Vardousia, Volvi, Vegoritida, Kerkini, Strymonas, Arachthos, Alfios.

  The soft blanket is wrapped around the body of my unknown fellow traveler, who is now preparing to sink into a luxurious sleep. What does he have in common with Menelaos Argyriou? Wrapped in a filthy blanket covered in lice and vomit, on the ship’s third class deck, he sailed to America to start the story of a new life from the beginning. It was the second time. He was now leaving behind more things that he would have to pretend to forget. Not only his land and orchard, but Little Frosso with her unworn red dress. Little Frosso never made it to America. Her journey was interrupted halfway there, on the seventh day. Her body arched, bent over and sank. She never made it here and so it was as if she never left there.

  “From the time we were born, inside us we have confused here with there, now with then, before with after.”

  Our family walked a tightrope between oblivion and truth. That’s how we grew up. Like so many other families since the beginning of time, the things it had to forget were more than those it could bear to remember.

  “Years later, when she chose her new name, the name Frosso was banned. And along with it the word ‘Greece’.”

  Her eyes stopped looking at us.

  “Her breath smelled bad when she came near me. I wanted to run away.”

  Her voice broke.

  “You wake up in the morning and the whole world has changed.”

  She would get angry at anyone who called her Frosso. Tipsy from drinking, more and more every day.

  “And you, Jonathan, struggling to make heads or tails of it all. Even just a little bit. Otherwise you can’t live. But the heads might bite and the tails might sting.”

  In eight hours, everything will be different. I’ll begin to understand everything that escapes me now.

  “Trapped in a dream. But if you don’t take a risk, how will you be saved?”

  On the Holy Rock of the Acropolis—in a few hours I’ll be there. As I look at the amber color of the Marbles, will I be able to see your eyes? Or will I just hear your voice whispering once more: “You’re alone here, a stranger in a strange land”?

  “There are altars there and sanctuaries that aren’t visible, and underground arcades that lead to the sea. You’ll put on a clean white shirt, Jonathan, and if there’s a southern wind blowing, you’ll hear the sound of the waves.”1

  The young woman with the khaki-colored pumps is getting ready to serve lunch.

  “Later,” I tell her.

  She flashes a smile at me and turns to the other passengers.

  * * *

  Sometimes Mama’s face would glow. On certain Friday afternoons, when she would come by the school to pick me up and take me to the Metropolitan Museum’s gallery to see the statues. I was just a kid, but she would make me look at them for hours. What was I supposed to make of them? “Just look at them, that’s enough,” she would say. She seemed happy then. Was I her favorite son or something else? I saw statues, marbles and nude men, and young women, pots and talismans, jewelry, clasps and necklaces—what was I supposed to make of them? The museum guards, the doormen, the guides, they all knew her. “Hello, Ma’am.” “This is my son.” Why did she want me with her? She definitely went there alone. Perhaps even every day. At five thirty the Met closed. We were always the last ones to leave. One day, she led me in front of a marble stele. It showed a woman next to a man. The man was naked, one hand resting on his chin, the other holding a sword, looking at the woman. She was facing away from him. S
he was wrapped in a piece of fabric that enveloped her body in folds. Between them stood an ewer. “It’s a lekythos,” she said, and then: “Write it down.” In my notebook I wrote down “lekythos” in my child’s handwriting. I was seven years old, for God’s sake, what sense could I make of a funerary stele? They were both dead. The man was a warrior, he was off to battle; the woman would make a libation, she would sacrifice to the gods. On the wall hung a soldier’s uniform, a helmet and a sword. The battle would prove deadly. The man would be killed. The woman would die of persistent and protracted sorrow. “Write it down,” she said, “write down that the woman died.” Next to the word “lekythos,” I jotted down the verb “died.”

  Amalia?

  “Yes, Jonathan?”

  I wish you could have been with me on those Friday afternoons.

  “That wasn’t possible, Jonathan, I had my piano lessons and my singing. Friday was my music day, have you forgotten?”

  Have you any idea how often I hear your voice filling me up inside, like a benevolent sea, like . . . I haven’t the words to say sea, sun, son, song . . . Do you remember your voice, Amalia?

  “I remember, Jonathan. Your voice is the last thing of yours you forget.”

  The Northern Star

  Will bring clear skies

  But before a sail appears in the sea

  I’ll turn into a wave and fire

  To embrace you, foreign land . . .

  Stop, Amalia! It makes me want to cry.

  “There’s no point in that. Just listen to the voice.”

  And you, lost motherland of mine, so far away

  You’ll become a caress and a wound

  When day breaks in another land . . .

  When you cry in flight, the flight attendant comes to see to you.

  “Excuse me, sir, is anything wrong? Can I help you?”

  “It’s nothing, I’ll be okay. I just had a curious dream. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  Now I’m flying to life’s celebration

  Now I’m flying to the feast of my joy

  My olden moons

  My newfound birds

  Chase away the sun and daylight from the hill

  And watch me go by

  Like lightning across the sky.2

  When she went to City Hall to change her name, our visits to the museum abruptly stopped. My notebook disappeared. When I searched, it was nowhere to be found. This woman is our mother. I was born and raised in New York. I never knew my father’s name, never saw his face. Two years after me, my sister was born. I don’t know who her father is or if we have the same father. Our mother doesn’t tell us truths. She tells us lies, and even more than the lies are the things that are lost in silence.

  The flight attendant is young and pretty. I remember those Fridays, when she too was transformed into an unexpectedly beautiful creature. Attractive? Yes, you could go so far as to call her attractive. There are times when you mistake her for a young woman, but she’s well past fifty. The others died years ago. The three of us live in a big apartment.

  “‘The three of us’ did you say, Jonathan? Are we back to that again? You said ‘The three of us live.’”

  I will not respond to that, Amalia. I’ll go on. She drinks incessantly. The empty bottles of cranberry and apple juice, vodka and whiskey.

  “Disheveled and unkempt, she wanders around like a shadow of her shadow.”

  In her own little world, like we don’t even exist.

  “Looking for tenderness in the void.”

  She wasn’t always like this. Do you remember her, Amalia? Do you remember her when she wasn’t like this? Nicely dressed, with freshly shampooed hair, brightly colored scarves around her neck and an elegant fur hand muff for the winter cold. You never said so, but you were afraid you’d take after her.

  “Yes, I didn’t want to take after her. In anything. I didn’t want to have her voice. I was in the bathroom, singing, the door was closed, Anthoula got confused. ‘What a beautiful song, Mrs. Frosso! Don’t stop!’ ‘No, Anthoula, it’s me.’”

  Amalia, that woman has nothing of yours. You run and hide when you hear her coming back at night, at some ungodly hour, walking slowly up the stairs and you lock yourself up in your room, afraid to see yourself in that damaged face. Sweet­heart, you have nothing of hers; it’s all yours, the eyes, the smell, your skin; you have nothing of hers.

  “Her voice, Jonathan, is the same as mine. It’s been years. She was in her room and I heard her humming a song. The door was ajar. I slipped inside. She didn’t notice. ‘The south wind came, the north wind came, the waves they came to take you / My love, you flew away from me / Because you were the sky.’ I got goose bumps. ‘Mama, what a beautiful song! Mama, sing some more!’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Don’t come in like that, without knocking, into someone else’s room.’ I don’t want to be like her, Jonathan.”

  She was born in Astoria, Queens. We were born in Manhattan. Years went by. Grandpa died. Grandma moved to an old folks’ home. It was her own decision. You would never do something so heartless. Nor would you ever let Anthoula leave the house and disappear into the crowds of Manhattan. And if it were up to you, you would never let me travel alone, especially now, to that country that’s sinking. How can I get rid of dreams and age-old darknesses, how can I turn myself into something I have not yet become, in order to make room enough inside me for this unknown land?

  Should I think of the other Frosso, with her twenty-year-old body, before history broke her in pieces? Should I think of her vegetable garden in Podarades, her garden, the pit that’s only for flowers and not for the buried bodies of friends, relatives who once came together and are now like strangers and like hate? Should I conjure up before me a girl who didn’t want to leave that place which later everyone would want to leave? Shall I meet Little Frosso of New Ionia and Cappadocia? Should I listen to her song? The color of her voice? And then should I not be afraid, should I hear the sound her body made as it dove into the deep?

  The iron bird lurched as if rudderless. The sign just went on: “Fasten seat belt.”

  * * *

  “Don’t be afraid of anyone,” Grandma Erasmia used to tell us when bedtime came around. Then we’d say our prayers. They were made of two parts. Two halves. Half English, half Greek. “Dear God, please take good care of our family, Iesous Christos nikai ke ola ta kaka skorpai, and there is no evil on earth.”

  It was the winter of 1995, Sunday lunchtime. Grandpa was ill in the hospital. That day, Grandma left him for a little and came home. Mama was out. “I want to talk to you,” she said. “There’s a story I want you to hear.” Do you remember, Amalia? We were unprepared. What we saw, that was all we knew, and the things that couldn’t be seen were as if nonexistent. “I had a sister,” said Grandma. We gave each other a puzzled look. She had a sister, and why did she only tell us now, why did she let all these years go by? “Here she is,” she said, “I have her right here,” and she took the picture out of her bosom. “She was your Grandpa’s first wife,” she said, “my little sister.” Her little sister looked at us with bleary, timeworn eyes, her hair wavy, her beautiful hair, her nose, her cheeks, the line of her chin, her dimple, deeper on the right, and the suspicion of a smile. “This is my sister.” Here, I carry that little photo with me now. Here, I have it. That tired photo. So Grandma had a sister and this sister whom she was revealing to us now for the first time was Grandpa’s first wife? You had Bellino in your arms. You put him down and went to her side.

  “Bellino was in no mood for petting that day.”

  You sat next to her. You loved her, I knew it from the beginning, more than you did our mother or me; it was her, Erasmia, whom you loved. Did you know the story? Did you pity her situation? How safe an indicator of love is pity? You took the yellowed Frosso in your fingers, you stood looking at her for a long time, and the whole time G
randma was speaking, you held her paper dead sister in your hands. Why didn’t we think it strange, Amalia? Why didn’t we say: “Why haven’t you told us of your sister all this time? Why now?”

  “It was so beautiful, Jonathan, the photo!”

  Did we already know? How many things do children know without knowing? Grandma began talking to us slowly and steadily at first and then without pausing, in a haste that would not let up, in a single breath.

  “She was five years old and I was seven, I held her by the hand, September of ’22,3 frantic, we were running along the quay at Smyrna, in one minute we had to leave, we had to abandon our identity, in one minute what we were had ceased to exist, tightly, as tightly as possible, I held her by the hand so as not to lose her, my little sister, everything was getting lost then, there was nothing easier than to get lost, I don’t remember anything else, only the cries, the weeping of the women who were losing their children, babies screaming because their mothers had left them to save themselves, dark instincts transform you at such times, I saw a mother tearing her son from her arms and setting him on the ground, so she would be lighter and able to save herself, and another cutting her finger, so as to be the same as her injured child which was screeching as if it were being slaughtered by a thousand swords, and she was howling in the same way as her child, they say that you can’t die another’s death, but I saw mothers dying their children’s deaths, I saw the Turks, the charging horses, the dust, the dogs barking fiercely, a roar, dead bodies strewn about like they were nothing, people running like a river to the sea, we were carried off by the raging torrent of the crowd, from Talas,4 that’s all I know, one name, Talas, and the caves, the Fairy Caves they called them, pyramids sculpted out of the rocks, near Goreme, that’s where we would play, my sister, who had the voice of an angel, and I, that’s what I remember, butterflies, the sound of an oud, a hill covered in orange trees, and a mother, a father, relatives next to us, cattle, horses, dogs, donkeys, us running to the sea, they pushed us onto a rowboat, they were all lost, my mother, Amalia, I never saw her again, nor anyone else, I remember her voice, when foreign hands grabbed her, ‘my Little Frosso, the apple of my eye, keep an eye out for her,’ and then my eyes grew dark, somebody pushed us onto a rowboat, I shut my eyes, but I was holding onto her tightly, I wasn’t going to let her go, not for anything. They could have given me the sky and the earth below, and I would not have let go. With the ribbon I pulled off my plaits, I tied her hand tightly to mine. My Little Frosso, it’s the two of us now, no more Fairy Caves, no more hatırı and ciǧer, no more hediye, no more canım.5 Gone is your voice that enchanted one and all. Little Frosso has the voice of an angel, she’s a tiny little thing but you can be proud of her, and whoever picked up an oud and touched its chords, you’d start to sing: ‘What do you care / Where I’m from / Whether from Karadassi / Or from Kordelio . . . ’ From the rowboat to a ship and from there from port to port until we arrived at a foreign harbor, Piraeus. We didn’t say a word, we kept our mouths obstinately shut, as if someone wanted to force feed us something unbearable, we didn’t make a sound, we just held each other tightly by the hand, I don’t know for how many days . . . and then we ended up there. In this new land. ‘It’ll be like a homeland here,’ they told us. The word ‘like’ made all the difference. But we grew up, we went to school, in New Ionia,6 in Podarades. We built a small life. A brother of Mama’s helped us. That was it. We never spoke of other places, or of those who were lost. I held her tightly by the hand until she became a big girl. Up until the day Menelaos and Uncle came and told us: